Originally presented at the second in the newly-launched series of International Conferences on English Historical Dialectology, held at the University of Bergamo in August 2007, the contributions collected in this volume discuss significant aspects of socio-geo-historical variation in language. In addition to British English, the focus is on Dutch, Scots and varieties of English outside England (in Wales and in the American colonies of the seventeenth century), in a time span ranging from medieval times to the nineteenth century. The aim is to highlight the traits that allow scholars to approach the study of English in a broader European perspective, identifying the patterns that show convergence or divergence, not just in terms of shared linguistic features (morphosyntactic, lexical or pragmatic), but also in terms of methodological approaches. In this respect, great attention is given to the latest developments in corpus and computational linguistics, showing the extent to which such new tools as electronic atlases and tagged corpora may facilitate answers to important research questions. At the same time, perceptual dialectology is awarded new interest on account of its significant role in normative and argumentative language use. Contents:

Marina Dossena/Roger Lass: Introduction - Roger Lass: Richard M. Hogg: In memoriam - Pieter van Reenen/Margit Rem/Evert Wattel: The Localization of Medieval Texts of Unknown Provenance - Hermann Moisl: Using Electronic Corpora in Historical Dialectology Research: The Problem of Document Length Variation - Roger Lass/Margaret Laing: Databases, Dictionaries and Dialectology. Dental Instability in Early Middle English: A Case Study - María José Carrillo-Linares/Edurne Garrido-Anes: Middle English Word Geography: External Sources for Investigating the Field - Julia Fernández Cuesta/Mª Nieves Rodríguez Ledesma: The Northern Echo: Continuities in Contemporary Northern English - Robert McColl Millar: The Origins of the Northern Scots Dialects - Nicholas Brownlees: Welsh English in English Civil War Pamphlets - Adrian Pablé: Reconstructing the History of Two Colonial New England Terms of Address: Goodman and Goodwife.